Air traffic control is an important function to maintain operation of increasingly congested airspace. As airspace and airport activity increases, reliance on improved techniques for managing air traffic is necessary to maintain safe and efficient activity.
Decision support tools (DST) may be used to assist human operators (such as air traffic controllers, airline operators and pilots), who make many of the pertinent decisions to manage airspace and airport activity. For example, decision support tools may receive real-time airspace and airport activity data, analyze the data, and provide recommendations to the human controllers. The human operators may receive each recommendation and then implement the recommendation or a portion thereof, ignore the recommendation, or take another action during management of the airspace and airport activity.
Testing a DST may be an expensive and time consuming process. For example, a real-time test of a DST using human operators may require many months to complete and still may lack an ability to exhaustively test all possible scenarios of airspace and airport activity, thus making exhaustive testing impractical. Testing is an inherent part of the design process for the DST. The time and expense for conducting experiments using human operators limits the amount of data than can be collected to feed the design process of the DST.